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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24631930">To Sleep, Perchance</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiamatv/pseuds/tiamatv'>tiamatv</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(until it isn't), Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Dreams vs. Reality, M/M, Mark of Cain (Supernatural)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 00:53:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,397</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24631930</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiamatv/pseuds/tiamatv</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean wasn’t used to good dreams. But he was used to taking what he could get—so when he dreamed of a lean, compact body pressed against his back, an arm heavy over his waist, he settled into it, hazy and comfortable.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Castiel/Dean Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>92</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>To Sleep, Perchance</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/kelliwyrm">Kelli</a> for taking a look at this, assuring me it wasn't too incoherent, and finding my typos!</p><p>(Yes, I know the title is cheesy... I'm so sorry.)</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dean wasn’t used to good dreams. But he was used to taking what he could get—so when he dreamed of a lean, compact body pressed against his back, an arm heavy over his waist, he settled into it, hazy and comfortable. Dean rose into it then sunk; slept. Realized that it had been someone male the next morning. Huh. Okay.</p><p>Dean realized that he was sort of right and sort of wrong about all that when an angel blinked at him blue-eyed in the dark of Bobby’s home, stern as if he were graven from stone, graveling out, “I’m not here to perch on your shoulder.”</p><p>Angels weren’t ethereal and benevolent and pretty. They were not fluffy. They sure as hell didn’t carry harps.</p><p>(Okay, they were kind of pretty.)</p><p>“Three days ago, you thought there was no such thing as me,” Castiel said, and he was right, and to Dean’s bizarre brain, that apparently meant imaginary cuddles with the angel who’d yanked him out of the hot box.</p><p>Dean’s dream mind was a weird place. He shrugged.</p><p>It wasn’t the last time, but it was the first.</p><p>Most nights, when he had the dream, it was nothing more than that. Castiel molded into his spine, knees pressing lightly behind Dean’s. (He tried to figure out if it was skin touching him, or cloth, or, hell, trenchcoat, but he could never remember when he woke up.) He smelled like electricity, or like steel. He felt rigid and unbreakable. They were lying on nothing, in nothing, just… there.</p><p>Dean didn’t try to shake off the arm resting around his waist, shove forward until he didn’t have some six feet of angelic asshole against his back. Why should he? It was kind of comfortable, actually. It was just lying in the dark in nothing, on nothing, unreality soft around them. His back was warm, and it was peaceful in a way Dean didn’t get much, these days. Or ever.</p><p>“I don’t see Hell while you’re here,” he noticed, finally.</p><p>He jumped when the angel curled around his back answered, grumpy, “Of course not.”</p><p>“You can <em>talk</em>,” Dean blurted.</p><p>Just because Castiel was pressed at his back didn’t mean that Dean couldn’t see the “are you an idiot, or are you just human?” being aimed at the back of his head.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>“Little angel has secrets,” Dean joked.</p><p>It was the first time he felt a smile pressed against the back of his neck. With the apocalypse and the end of the world looming, Dean found it weird that he registered that—but not, right now, any weirder than the rest of his life. Not any stranger than Castiel looking at him from across the gap of a park bench, looking little and unangelic as he said, ”<em>Can I tell you something if you promise not to tell another soul?</em>”</p><p>It was the first time he’d seen that smile, too, so he guessed it made sense.</p><p>The arm curled around him flattened a hand to his stomach, traced a warm print upwards to Dean’s hipbone, and settled there.</p><p>“Yes,” Castiel told him. “I do.”</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>It was weird actually <em>seeing</em> Cas in his dreams—standing by him as Dean sat on a dock and fished for metaphors, or… whatever fishing was supposed to mean, in dreams. Because Dean had never in his life actually wanted to go fishing. (Not going to get into what getting spooned by an angel in his dreams was supposed to mean, nope. He also didn’t exactly want to know what would have happened if Cas had dropped into one of <em>those </em>dreams. Smiting?)</p><p>It was weirder to <em>know</em> that it was Cas, real, not dream—not warm metal and unbreakable and curled around him in a dark, invisible space, but messy and worried, with a crease in his forehead and hands in his pockets.</p><p>(Sometimes he wondered if Cas would get all angelic on him if he ever told him that he really was fluffy, after all. Dean thought it was more likely that he’d just look perplexed, though.)</p><p>“Cas, what’s wrong?” he asked.</p><p>It was the last thing he asked of someone he’d thought of as a friend, because hearing “I don’t serve Man, and I certainly don’t serve you” hurt a fucking lot more than he’d thought it would.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>“Righteous,” a tousled-up blue angel told the back of his head, and nuzzled him.</p><p>“Shut the fuck up,” laughed Dean, and hugged the arm closer around his front. He hadn’t had this since… well, awhile, now. But what the fuck, with Lucifer out of the box and Cas not broken and drunk and drugged in a fucked-up future, <em>alive </em>and not splattered all over the inside of Chuck’s house, why shouldn’t he have this?</p><p>He felt an angel’s smile, the tight, reserved curve of it against the stretch of his skin right where his neck met spine, a deep jutting press. “Beautiful, then.”</p><p>“Yeah, not that either.”</p><p>“But you are.”</p><p>Dean snorted. “Look who’s talking.”</p><p>“This is just my vessel.”</p><p>“No, Cas. It’s really not.” It wasn’t the first time he’d said the name aloud, not at all, but it was the first time he said it here, in his head.</p><p>There was a bed under them, he noticed. It had a pillow.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>“How come you’re always behind me in these?”</p><p>Cas laughed, and Dean felt the careful nuzzle of a nose, punctuated by a careful scratch of stubble. “Why, Dean?” and he shuddered to hear his name. “Don’t you like me here?”</p><p>“Well, <em>yeah</em>, but…”</p><p>“Turn around, then.”</p><p>Dean did, twisting, interested.</p><p>He woke up.</p><p>He didn’t do it again.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>“No,” he said, tangled with it, when the hand on his stomach drifted up and over a nipple. It withdrew, quickly.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” Castiel told him.</p><p>It was all a dream, Dean knew this. He’d known it from the beginning. Cas didn’t walk in his head anymore. Couldn’t, anymore, as far as Dean knew. This one in his mind belonged just to him.</p><p>Not to Heaven, where God couldn’t and wouldn’t help them. Not to Earth, where Cas had stood over him and beat him bloody, because once upon a time he’d told Cas that he didn’t fucking believe in Destiny, and watched an angel drop from the sky and sacrifice himself for it.</p><p>He’d believed it himself up until the moment he hadn’t.</p><p>“No, just—” and he grabbed at the hand before it withdrew the rest of the way. “Not really feelin’ that right now.”</p><p>Cas-that-wasn’t nodded against the back of his shoulder. “Should I go?” He pressed in a kiss, and Dean knew he didn’t really mind.</p><p>Dean sort of loved that in his dreams, Cas actually asked that rather than just fucking off in a flutter. He liked a lot <em>less</em> hearing himself ask, “Will you be back?”</p><p>He felt the tight little smile against the back of his neck. “I will always come when you call.”</p><p>It wasn’t true in reality, though Dean knew that reality wasn’t entirely Cas’s fault, either. But maybe in dreams it could be true.</p><p>“Will you come back even if I don’t ask for you?” Dean asked, curiously.</p><p>“Dean, I always have.”</p><p>That was true, too. In reality and otherwise.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>“Assbutt? Really, <em>assbutt?</em> Of all the insults in all the world you could’ve picked, Cas—"</p><p>“You said that awake, too,” Cas retorted, grouchily—and bit him.</p><p>Holy fuck he hadn’t had <em>that</em> reaction when Dean had been awake.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>“Would you do it? Touch me again.” Dean thought he asked more out of curiosity than desire, though. It wasn’t that he hadn’t <em>thought</em> about it, but it was still… something. It still felt weird. Awkward. He’d had sex dreams before, <em>hot</em> ones (and yeah, goddammit, a couple of times they <em>had </em>featured Cas, six wings spread as he sheriffed his way through Heaven, and Dean did not one bit want to know why Sammy couldn’t look straight at him the next morning.)</p><p>But these dreams were not the same. These were… deliberate.</p><p>“If you asked me to.” Like an answer, fingertips traced the matted ridges and bumps of a scar on Dean’s left shoulder that had been gone for years, his skin in reality washed clean. It was a bizarre feeling—numb, unreal. But not unpleasant.</p><p>“But only if I asked?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>Dean snorted. “I hate you sometimes, you know that?”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>It might have even been the truth.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>“It is a little absurd, though. Superman going over to the dark side. I’m still just Castiel,” Cas said, trying for casual betrayal so hard that it hurt, so hard that it stabbed bloody, and in that moment, hating him <em>was</em> the truth.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>Maybe he should have known Cas was okay. Maybe he shouldn’t have hung onto that stupid fucking trenchcoat. Maybe he’d never really understood what was between them until Cas was shattered and spilled black out over the surface of a water reservoir.</p><p>“I miss you,” he told the darkness around them.</p><p>“I miss you, too,” Cas told him, and it sounded sincere. “I wanted to protect everyone, and I failed. I wanted to protect Heaven. I wanted to protect you.”</p><p>Dean knew. He knew all that. That didn’t mean it hadn’t been really fucking <em>stupid</em>.</p><p>Maybe he didn’t really understand until Cas broke himself for Sam.</p><p>The dream holding him close after that wasn’t just quiet, wasn’t just thoughtful. It was silent, as if Cas’s daytime babbling was all that it could say, and if that was all it had, it would say nothing at all.</p><p>Or maybe it—maybe he—understood that hearing sanity here would be too hard. His dreams didn’t give him hope. Dean Winchester didn’t dream those kinds of dreams.</p><p>But the arms around him were warm and safe and solid and steady, and that hope was terrible enough.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>Dean didn’t sleep in Purgatory. He didn’t dream. Cas, beside him, was scruffy and dirty and fierce, so real that they bled with it.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>He knew Cas was strange, when they came back. Dean knew it. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he knew it.</p><p>“What’s wrong?” Cas asked, into the dark. The walls were made of stars.</p><p>Dean shook his head. “I don’t know.” He didn’t deny that something was.</p><p>Cas’s hand slid up and down his side, calluses from his angel blade a delicate silky rasp. “Isn’t it enough that I’m back, Dean?”</p><p>Dean shivered as Cas fitted his hand to the scar on his shoulder. He breathed, “Yeah, I guess so. Yeah.”</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>The handprint on his shoulder disappeared when Cas did from the crypt, a pained, panicked look in his eyes so different from his normal confusion, and a stone tablet clutched to his chest.</p><p>“I need you, too,” Cas told him, his face pressed between Dean’s shoulder blades, his body hunched. He hadn’t said the words aloud, outside of these dreams. Even here, he didn’t say them often. Dean knew, he knew it was probably true, but he felt the way his jaw still ached with phantom breaks, his eyes still swollen shut even though he knew they were healed as only an angel could. “I’m sorry.”</p><p>He knew Cas was. He knew even the real Castiel was.</p><p>It didn’t make it better.</p><p>“Go,” said Dean.</p><p>He did.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>“You’re back. I didn’t ask you to come back.”</p><p>“I know.” He felt the chest pressed to his back move as if there were more Cas was going to say. But those were the only words that made it out, curved and broken.</p><p>But Dean folded his fingers through the ones over his belly, and reached out to turn off the light made of headlights and moonlights on the bedside table. “I’m glad you’re here.</p><p>Cas always came back, even when Dean didn’t ask him to.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>“Could I have stopped you?” If he’d paid more attention. If he hadn’t driven Cas off, left him behind. If he hadn’t been so focused on Sam. (Dean wouldn’t ask himself to be less focused on Sam.)</p><p>“What do you think?” Cas asked, and Dean felt the blanket of feathers being pulled up over both of their thighs, nestling rustling at his waist. He’d never seen those wings except in shadows, and now he never would. He couldn’t unsee them burning as they fell, they all fell.</p><p>“I think you’re a goddamned pillar of light,” Dean told him, irritably. (Except was he still? Could he still be that, wingless and graceless?)</p><p>How a dream could be judgmental at his back, Dean didn’t know. Too much from the source material, maybe.</p><p>Dean snorted. “You’re an <em>angel</em>, you dumbass. And you do whatever the fuck you want.”</p><p>He felt the kiss that tickled just under his ear and sent a purl of warmth down his neck. “And I’ve fallen before,” an angel whispered into his ear, “for you.”</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>
  <em>Metatron took your grace. I didn’t know. So I screamed into the abyss for you, and you didn’t come. So I kept screaming until someone heard me.</em>
</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>He waited in the dark, after the reaper, after the bunker, after Cas’s quiet expression when he nodded and said, “Oh. Alright,” with his heart broken in his eyes.</p><p>Cas, human, wasn’t indomitable. He was blue-eyed and quiet and a little sad, but… hopeful. Or he had been, until that moment.</p><p>Dean waited, jittery, in a bed that didn’t feel anything like his memory foam, with sheets on it that tangled but never needed to be washed. He waited to say sorry—for the lines, for the pain, for the shittiness that was humanity. For the piece of crap that was Dean Winchester.</p><p>“Please, Cas,” he whispered, into an unbearable silence.</p><p>The stars that made up the walls twinkled. The blanket of feathers covering him burned, smelling vaguely of ozone. No one put a hand on his hip. No one nuzzled the back of his head and smiled in a way no-one else could see.</p><p>Maybe it was because his mind knew that Cas was human, now, breakable.</p><p>Maybe it was because even Dean’s mind knew he didn’t deserve to say sorry.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>He didn’t see him again at all until after Kevin… until after Kevin. Until there were needles in Sam’s brain and Sam was <em>Sam</em>.</p><p>He’d seen Cas angry; he’d seen Cas <em>wrathful</em>.</p><p>Cas forgave him so quietly it was like no forgiveness at all.</p><p>“I wish you’d gotten mad,” he mumbled, pulling the pillow tighter in front of him. He wasn’t sure when another one had appeared, but he and Cas kept sharing the other.</p><p>Fingers brushed, gently, over the ridge where the handprint had never come back. “I don’t know why I’d do that. I made you smile instead.”</p><p>He had.</p><p>“I didn’t deserve that.”</p><p>“You do,” Cas whispered, behind him, invisible as always. “You always did.”</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>The Mark of Cain gulped the dreams, swallowed them, ravenous the way Dean’s body had forgotten how to be. When they came they were hot and thick, and there was blood in them, and sex, not serenity, not arms around his waist. Cas looked at him strangely the next morning, and Dean snapped, whirled.</p><p>“You’re doing it. You’re spying on my dreams,” he accused, unfairly angry. “You’re doing it, I know you are.”</p><p>Why, when Cas never had before? He’d never said a word about a wall of stars, a nightlight like a headlamp, a blanket that rustled with feathers, the press against Dean’s back as they lay on their sides and Cas traced a finger up and down the outside of Dean’s thigh.</p><p>“I don’t have wings to do that anymore,” Cas told him, with a loss that he could never completely scrub from his voice. In a nastier moment Dean might have asked ‘and whose fault is that?!’ but he didn’t; he was nasty enough, already. “Your dreams are your own, Dean, I don’t have any interest in them,” and him saying that hurt worse, hurt dirtier, than the thought of him peeking into Dean’s brainpan, curious and remote.</p><p>Dean snarled and turned away.</p><p>Cas looked bewildered.</p><p>Then Dean swung.</p><p>The Mark burned and burned and burned.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>His dream understood, of course. It always did. Except when Dean knew he didn’t mean it to.</p><p>He didn’t want to understand why Cas had swallowed Lucifer. He didn’t want to understand. But Dean had had an angry angel to knock sense into him when he’d looked down the other side of the barrel of that gun.</p><p>Who had Cas had?</p><p>“I’ll bring you home,” he told it, as fierce about it asleep as he was awake. “Cas, I’m bringing you home.”</p><p>“I am home,” Castiel told him, softly, holding him tight.</p><p>For the first time, it wasn’t enough.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>When Cas died, Dean lay in the quiet of his own mind without an angel beside him, and slept, dark and empty and dreamless as the ash of wings on the ground. The stars went out, one by one.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>Cas had gotten pretty good at hugs. Dean realized, abstractly, that it was a lot nicer than having someone spooned against his back—being able to hold and touch.</p><p>Being able to know.</p><p>And Dean did know. He did. He’d known for years. He’d known since not long after he’d dreamed of an angel holding him close and safe at night. He’d known every time they’d lost each other. He’d known every time they’d found each other again.</p><p>There was still so much fear when they parted, so much disbelief, so much old, aching hurt when he saw that pointed, familiar face smiling tentatively, tiredly, up at him.</p><p>It was so tiring, having nothing but a dream. It was exhausting. But then Dean hadn’t even had that.</p><p>Cas made a funny, awkward little squeak of a sound when their lips met. He tasted like lemon meringue pie, cool and just on the edge of too tart, with just the softest, plush sugar edge of sweetness. He kissed back too hard, a little uncomfortable, like he was trying to climb underneath Dean’s skin.</p><p>Sam gargled, “Holy <em>shit</em>,” from somewhere behind Dean’s back.</p><p>Yeah, Dean couldn’t have dreamed that.</p><p>*_*_*</p><p>“Do you still need me?” the voice like whiskey and smoke and home whispered. The breath of it tickled the back of his neck, but there was no weight to the body behind him, nothing solid about the hand that was petting gently up and down his hip.</p><p>Need was a damned funny thing.</p><p>“I… dunno,” Dean answered, honest here the way he so rarely could be awake. “Did I ever?”</p><p>He could feel the small, curving smile between his shoulder blades long after the weight behind him had faded away.</p><p>Cas didn’t say goodbye. But then, he never did.</p><p>*_*_*_*</p><p>Dean shuddered when he woke up. His breath was a morning-sour gasp and the muscles of his arms knotted inwards, curling up too tightly, holding him together.</p><p>But there was something wrapped in them, some<em>one</em>, resolving into bone and muscle, warm and solid and compact. Dean’s face was wet, and the smell of soap and lightning was in his nose.</p><p>“Dean?” Cas asked, sleepily. He turned, and their knees bumped, clumsy. A foot poked between his ankles. “Are you alright?” Full lips nuzzled his collarbone, and, as always, they were kind of dry. Dean’s whole front felt a little uncomfortably warm.</p><p>“Yeah.” Dean closed his eyes, and breathed. “Yeah, I’m fine.”</p><p>Cas didn’t feel unbreakable. He didn’t smell like metal. He tasted completely unangelic, like lemon zest and marshmallow, and Dean couldn’t get enough.</p><p>He felt alive. He felt real.</p><p>He was.</p><p>Dean tightened his arms when Cas tried to raise his head to look at him. Angel eyes saw too damned much in the dark.</p><p>“Are you sure?” Cas asked, softly, into his neck.</p><p>“Yeah,” Dean smiled through the tears, and pressed his lips to Cas’s sleep-messy dark hairline. “Just a dream.”</p><p>~fin~</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading! This whole thing came to me at five in the morning. I'm not going to lie, the original concept seemed, uh, a lot smuttier, but then I went back to sleep and lost those details. I think I like the way it turned out somewhat better...</p></blockquote></div></div>
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